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At 67, Coughlin Proves a Taskmaster Can Be Tender

Tom Coughlin, with his grandson Brennon, is beginning his 10th season as the coach of the Giants.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — When Tom Coughlin’s children were growing up, they developed a routine when it came time to ask their father for something.

The initial answer, they knew, would be no.

“Because the first time you ask him anything, he always says no,” Judy Coughlin, Tom’s wife of 46 years, explained. “It’s just spontaneous with him. Whatever it is, it just pops out: no.”

But Judy would instruct her children to wait and then ask again.

“When you come back, he can rationally revisit it, and the answer often is yes,” Judy said, laughing. “It’s just the way he is. Given time, he sees things differently.”

Tom Coughlin is beginning his 10th season as the coach of the Giants, and in that time, he has ranted, raved and waved his arms on the sideline until his deportment has become an immutable fixture of the team’s culture. His countenance is as familiar as the team logo — the downturned upper lip, the hands on hips, a man whose face seems perpetually red from exhortation, irritation or unyielding determination.

But Coughlin turned 67 on Saturday. He has 11 grandchildren. A game might still bring out sideline histrionics, but during the team’s practices he is subdued, more likely to commend than to condemn. Once a habitual yeller with a voice that could be heard across two football fields, he now gives instructions that are usually inaudible except to the players nearest to him.

He has written reflective books and gone on tours to promote them, yukking it up with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show.”

In time, Coughlin has begun to see things differently. And why not? Two Super Bowl victories ought to breed serenity and fulfillment.

But those closest to him say it was not the second championship, in 2012, that changed him; it was the birth of a third generation of Coughlins.

“Grandkids have softened him,” Judy Coughlin said. “People think it’s winning two Super Bowls, but that’s not it. He wasn’t around for our kids a lot of the time, and when he was, it was, ‘Line up your shoes; go take a bath.’ But with grandkids, it’s different. You have all of the love, but you don’t have all of the responsibility. He’s had more fun with them.

“At this point in his life, he doesn’t care if he shows the softer side of him. He’s going to show his love.”

That benevolence has extended to his players. In the hours before the Giants’ last Super Bowl, love was an emotion foremost in Coughlin’s mind. It became the dominant theme of his final speech to the team before the game.

“He has not fundamentally changed,” Keli said. “He’s just reached a point where he sees that it’s time to enjoy some of these things. We in the family sat him down and said: ‘Hey, this is fun. Good things are happening. Enjoy it a little.’ ”

She added: “I wouldn’t say he’s loosened up — those aren’t the right words. But he’s trying to embrace the moment.”

Perhaps it is better to say that Coughlin is more at ease than he once was. Taskmaster Tom is routinely persnickety instead of simply exasperating. Because there is so much that has not changed at all.

All of the clocks in the Giants’ training and practice complex are still five minutes fast. Everyone calls it Coughlin time. Being two minutes early for a meeting still elicits a sharp rebuke for being tardy. Hats can be worn only forward, if at all. Players sit up straight, feet pressed against the floor.

Players pulling their uniform pants too high are still admonished or fined. Coughlin never wants to see a bare knee on his practice field, let alone during a game.

“You look like you’re wearing Bermuda shorts,” Coughlin will yell at some uninformed rookie who hikes his pants too high.

It has been a pet peeve of his since the 1980s.

While Coughlin’s daily interaction with reporters has evolved from stormy to convivial, certain things still set him off — for instance, if someone asks if he is “satisfied” with the production at a certain position. The word insults his ever-striving sensibilities.

“I don’t like the word ‘satisfied,’ ” he will say, wincing as if someone were poking him with a pointy stick. “That is not a good word for me. It doesn’t work, and it never has. I see things that I like, and I see things that I don’t like, and I see things that have to happen. It’s work in progress.”

Off the field, his lifestyle has not changed much. Coughlin is still the first person to flip on the lights at the team’s fitness center and weight room each morning, and he is usually pounding on the treadmill by 5:30 a.m.

He will probably be the last to leave, sometimes near midnight.

When Judy Coughlin was told this summer that reporters did not often see her husband outside of a football setting, she responded with a smile, “I don’t, either.”

But he does take vacations, albeit for just one week a year.

Ernie Bono, a friend of Coughlin’s since he was the Jacksonville Jaguars’ coach in the mid-1990s, has taken some of those one-week vacations with the Coughlins.

A game might still bring out sideline histrionics, but during Coughlin's team’s practices he is more subdued.Credit
Barton Silverman/The New York Times

“Trust me, you’d want him as your friend,” Bono said. “You would love him as a neighbor. I tell people that, and they say, ‘Come on, Ernie; I’ve seen him on the sideline cursing and yelling like he’s a crazy man.’

“And I explain that he’s supremely dedicated to his profession. If things go wrong, he gets very angry. But that is not the entire him. In my presence, I’ve never heard him curse or utter a single vulgarity. In his heart, he’s someone else.”

Bono helped Coughlin establish a charity, the Jay Fund, which assists the families of children who have cancer by providing financial, emotional and practical support throughout their treatments and recoveries. The fund is named after a player Coughlin coached at Boston College, Jay McGillis, who died of leukemia.

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“You have to go in the hospitals and watch how effortlessly he gives of himself to these kids and their parents,” Bono said. “We were in one child’s room, and she was near death, and Tom was on his knees in front of her just trying to get her attention — trying to let her know she wasn’t alone.

“I remember we left and got in his car. We sat in the parking lot crying.”

In June, at an ice cream social and tour of the Giants’ practice complex hosted by the Jay Fund, about 110 children and their parents followed Coughlin as they were entertained in the team’s weight and locker rooms, indoor practice facility and auditorium. Coughlin played with the children, many of whom left hospital wards for the day, and he visited with the parents. The day ended with ice cream, desserts, picture-taking and a magician in the team’s cafeteria.

“We do these events to give these kids a day away from medications or someone sticking them with a needle,” Coughlin said, surrounded by school-age children, the youngest of whom would sometimes climb into his arms. “The unthinkable is when a doctor comes into a child’s hospital room and tells you that your child has cancer. What happens to the parents is that their world as they knew it comes to a stop.

“They run to the side of the child. They stop paying bills or thinking about other things. Maybe the treatment bills pile up, and it becomes overwhelming for the family. And that’s where the Jay Fund comes in. We try to be there so they can be with their child.”

The Jay Fund, which has branched out from Jacksonville to New York in its nearly 20 years, consumes Coughlin like no interest other than his family and football. Coughlin said the charity had transformed him.

“It certainly makes you realize how unimportant a third-down play really is,” he said. “I mean, you see these kids who are trying to survive. It teaches you to take a step back.”

If Coughlin’s family, friends and colleagues agree that Coughlin has changed, they also acknowledge that the reforms were subtle and happened in stages, beginning in the winter of 2006-7. The Giants’ 2006 season had ended with an 8-8 record and a first-round playoff loss, the same way a promising 2005 season had suddenly concluded.

“At the end of 2006, his dictatorial style was a concern, and we told him that,” John Mara, a Giants co-owner, said recently. “He vowed he was going to make some changes. He said, ‘I know I’ve got to change.’ ”

Mara added: “He now has a more respectful manner with the players. He is not in their face as much. He’s still very tough. He has not changed his beliefs at all. He just shows more of his whole self, I guess.”

Judy Coughlin, who along with her children encouraged her husband to rethink some of his methods, put it this way: “Tom always said he had an open-door policy. But even he finally had to say, ‘No one has ever walked through the door.’ ”

When the 2007 Giants became Super Bowl champions, a changed Coughlin was celebrated, something he thought was overdone. To this day, he does not comfortably talk about how he has remade himself or been restyled.

“In the last four or five years, my image has changed a little bit,” he said in an interview this summer. “People see different things from me, and I see that happening, but I did not try to make it happen. I just did some things I knew were necessary for me to do.

“But I’m not trying to change anything about my image. I don’t spend any time thinking about it. I’m not trying to be someone different. I’m just trying to be true to myself.”

Still, those around him are affected by the changes they have seen.

In 2006, defensive end Mathias Kiwanuka was a central figure in what may be Coughlin’s most notorious sideline eruption. Kiwanuka had Titans quarterback Vince Young wrapped up for a sack but mistakenly let him go, leading to a pivotal first down in a Giants loss.

But Coughlin’s reaction became more memorable than Kiwanuka’s gaffe. Wild-eyed and screaming, he charged at Kiwanuka near the edge of the field, alternately leaping or kneeling to get in the towering player’s face. It was perhaps the moment in his professional career when Coughlin looked the most unhinged.

Today, Kiwanuka refers to his coach as a model of equanimity.

“He’s a good lesson,” Kiwanuka said. “He has proved that you can be a strong, tough leader in one aspect of your life, but you can also be a loving family man who cares for others in another aspect of your life. He has gone about making that obvious to all of us.

“We all see the whole man.”

Giants guard Chris Snee has seen the whole man for more than a decade, first as his son-in-law-to-be, then as a Pro Bowl player. Now Snee, who is married to Coughlin’s daughter Kate, is the father of three of Coughlin’s grandchildren.

“All I know is this: if it’s a weekend in the spring, my phone will be ringing early in the morning, and it’s him,” Snee said. “He will be asking what the sports schedule is for our kids that day. He’ll say, ‘Who’s playing what games and when?’ And you can count on him being there. He’s there smiling all day.”

Judy Coughlin believes that her grandchildren have made her husband a better coach.

“He connects with the kids; it’s a talent he has,” she said. “And a football team is like a family. I think that’s why a few years ago, he started going down to the locker room in the morning to sit with the players. He wanted them to get to know him better — so they could see the other side of him.”

Unlike his children many years ago, no one inside the Giants’ locker room is likely to ask for a favor, like the keys to the family car.

“I have no doubt the locker-room conversations are very different,” Judy Coughlin said with a laugh. “But he does have a unique ability for establishing bonds and relationships with people who need him, and that’s probably something few people know about him.

“Being able to make connections with people is a gift. And it’s the opposite of barking orders at people.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 1, 2013, on Page SP1 of the New York edition with the headline: At 67, Coughlin Proves a Taskmaster Can Be Tender. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe